A trip through the year looking at a Bach cantata each week. Comments, discussions, musings, wibblings are all welcome.

Monday, 12 November 2012

Wohl dem der sich auf seinen Gott- 23rd Sunday after Trinity

When
a friend of mine was about ten years old, she went to a new school.
Rather nervously, she went up to some other girls and asked if they
could play together. “Oh no,” they replied. “We don't play. We
socialise”. It sometimes seems a bit childish to have friends. You
can have partners, work colleagues, drinking mates, people who you
make a cursory nod to in the bus queue. But saying “you're my best
friend” to someone seems a bit playground-like. But as the
brilliant xkcd.com cartoon at http://xkcd.com/150/ says, being
grown-up means getting to decide what being grown-up actually means.
And here we have Bach fighting for our right as adults to put aside
so-called grown-up things- and just to say “God is my friend”.

The
first movement of the cantata is another one of those flowing
pastoral accompanied chorales. Everyone loves them- and that's why
Jesu bleibet meine Freude (or
Jesu, joy of man's desiring, if we're being English) from Cantata 147
regularly turns up on Soooooothing Classics compilations. But there's
a difference here; the melody is strongly led by the treble line, as
sung by the youngest boys in Bach's ensemble. The lower parts sing a
more complicated harmony, following a beat or two later; but it's the
children that lead the way, musically speaking. And this is perfectly
in line with what the cantata actually says in the first sentence
“Wohl dem, der sich auf seinen Gott recht kindlich kann
verlassen!”;good
for him, who can rely on God truly like a child. (And good for him
too, who can write less rubbish translations than I do...)

And
so the second movement gives us a wonderfully naif illustration of
this. Last week's cantata had a tenor's anguished lament of
self-doubt. This week, Bach gives us an almost laughably simple
repetition: “Gott ist mein Freund”,
again and again, declaimed with the clarity and directness of a road
sign. God. Is. My Friend. Underneath the soloist, there is a simple
chugging bass line, of the sort that Bach wrote for his amateur viola
da gamba playing boss in the sixth Brandenburg concerto, a sort of
eighteenth-century equivalent of letting the manager win at golf.
Everything about the music implies simplicity until Bach sets the
tenor free to indulge in a little vocal gymnastics on the words “Was
hilft das Toben?”. Toben is a
wonderful word, meaning bluster, raging, clamour. What good is all
this musical showing-off, in the face of a child-like faith? And so
we return to that mantra: God is my Friend, repeated enough to
embarrass a twenty-first century audience.

But
being recht kindlich- truly
child-like- doesn't just mean being simple and unaffected. It also
means being able to grow into true maturity and complexity. After a
brief alto recitative with bare harpsichord accompaniment, it's the
bass soloist's turn to show the contrast between the simple and the
complex. But here, it's the opposite of the tenor aria.. The tenor
contrasted a simple faith statement with a melismatic depiction of
the bluster of the adult world. Now, Bach uses a stentorian, almost
clumping setting for the words “Das Unglück schlägt auf
allen Seiten um mich ein zentnerschweres Band”- “Misfortune,
on all sides, winds me up in a hundredweight of chains”. Yet
suddenly the music breaks free on the words erscheinet die
helfender Hand- “the helping
hand appears”. The brakes come off, and the music has the freedom
to run virtuosically! All the vigour of a child prodigy is combined
with the poise and beauty of an adult craftsman. And the conclusion
of this quick flourishing? It's our old theme- daß Gott
allein der Menschen bester Freund muß sein, that
God alone must be the best friend of Man.

From
here, it's a quick run to the end of the cantata. There's another
quick interjection of recitative, but not accompanied austerely on
the harpsichord alone any more; this time it's given a halo of
strings around it. It's the same trick that Bach uses for the words
of Jesus in the St Matthew Passion. The higher-pitched accompaniment
gives it a more exalted feeling; but there's also more emotional
intensity as, unlike the harpsichord, the strings can sustain and
even increase their volume after the notes are initially played.

Finally, the chorale
brings us to a close. The word Trotz- usually translated
“defiance” appears three times in successive lines:

“Trotz
der Höllen Heer!Trotz auch des Todes Rachen!Trotz aller
Welt!”

“Defiance to the army of Hell! And defiance to the sting of Death!
Defiance to all the world!” would be a perfectly good translation.
But Trotz can also have a connotation of sulkiness, rudeness,
naughtiness. In the context of the child-like values of the rest of
the cantata, I like to think of it as sticking one's tongue out at
the Devil. So ner-ner-na-ner-ner to the hosts of hell, 'cos my best
Friend's bigger than you.